


Return of the Captain

by eris_of_imladris



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, Thorongil - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-30
Updated: 2019-03-30
Packaged: 2019-12-26 13:44:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 3,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18283469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eris_of_imladris/pseuds/eris_of_imladris
Summary: Aragorn’s soldiers from his days as Thorongil reunite with their captain and recall a strange victory.Written to earn a bingo in B2MEM 2019! Bingo-earning prompts: Aragorn as Aragorn, Wingfoot, tracker, Envinyatar, and captain.





	1. Chapter 1

The tavern door swung open and shut nearly instantaneously, the man entering with the skill of one used to hiding. And yet, his steps were off, his rhythm altered. We knew this because we knew him, even all these years later, and we knew the way he slunk into the room, invisible yet powerful, hood drawn over his face and clothes old and worn and torn and forlorn, all except for the star brooch that shone as brightly as ever.

We had not seen him in 60 years, but he looked nearly the same, with only a dusting of grey in his hair, which was far cleaner than it ever was during countless nights sleeping on the cold ground of Ithilien. He stood as tall as ever, and his grey eyes were piercing as they had been when we last fought alongside each other, but in them he held a wariness we had never seen, a cautious hope, rather than his usual stoic confidence.

He did not even have to speak. All he had to do was look over to our overcrowded table, and he was surrounded by thumping hands on his back and shouts of surprise and spilled beer and exclamations of joy and “where have you been?” and a lone voice asking if we could really trust that it was him.

Our battle training was old, but he had taught us well, and our faces soon soured. Why had he returned now after so many years, now that peace had come to our country and we didn’t need the kind of battle expertise it seemed he alone could provide? We still needed him, of course, but for other reasons, and for that, a shadow hung over the tavern. He had left us alone when we needed him most, and every one of us had faced a formal interrogation about where he had gone. The worst of it had passed long ago, but we had wondered and worried and now he was standing in front of us, looking strong and hale, a vision from the past reappeared to us in some elvish magic, or perhaps he had been reborn like our tree, something long dead come back to life. He baffled us all into silence.

“Thorongil?” His name came out as a whisper from Herion. He had scarcely dared to hope all these years, and now our hero stood before us again, and there was something for him to look at with awe and wonder.

The man simply nodded and took a seat at the table, facing us with silent eyes and a happy heart. What had happened to him to make him so happy? The last we had seen him, he had been positively glum, although he had been fresh off a battlefield where he had, once again, saved Gondor from the Corsairs. It was the last time we saw him, and we all still remembered the way his face had looked, framed against the setting sun – a bitter joy, a happiness marred by what was yet to come. We didn’t know it yet, but for some of us, it had been our last time seeing him – war was cruel, after all – and for others, it was just the beginning of a journey to reach this day at the Mumak and Keep.

The large barrels of ale shaped into an oliphaunt watched over us, its tusks faded with age but no less impressive than they had been when we were boys. But now we were old men, suspicious old men no longer willing to venerate our hero without at least a bit of proof that he was indeed the person we had been looking for.

“Can you prove it?” Carastor asked as he took a bite of a biscuit, the thick butter staining his lips yellow.

“I can tell you a tale few outside our company know,” he said, absentmindedly twisting a ring on his finger. A glittery green sheen flowed from two stones in the center. “Our battle outside Sírdhem, the one where I gave you far more questions than answers.”

“You could be one of the villagers of Sírdhem, or heard the story from someone else,” said Neithon, who probably looked the most similar to how Thorongil (if this was truly him) knew him. He still didn’t look his age, even after he left his leg on the Pelennor.

“Would they know why I left Gondor?”

“We don’t know that either,” Ganneldir interrupted. Lumorndir nodded bitterly, his earlier happiness to see his captain forgotten.

“I might,” Herion said quietly. “At least, I have a guess.”

“Tell it, then,” Ganneldir insisted. “If you truly want us to believe you.”

Thorongil settled in his chair the same way he did so many years ago, that tiny bit of physical proof enough to make Herion “hmm” as he took another swig of ale.

“As I recall, we were patrolling in a remote area of Ithilien not known to many outside of the rangers…”


	2. Chapter 2

There was a small plume of smoke on the horizon. I barely even noticed it, but Thorongil peered at his maps, muttering about some small village before telling us all to get our things together. It was late, too late for any of us to want to do anything, especially right as soon as I’d finished cooking a rabbit the new recruit managed to shoot down. Beginner’s luck, it had to be.

“Carastor, pack that up, we need to go,” he said as he walked by, stuffing things in his pack.

I grumbled, packing my supplies and reluctantly cutting the rabbit. “Do we need to go now? What’s even happening over there?”

“I don’t know,” Thorongil said, “but whatever it is, the people out there need our help.” This was all we got - no lectures, no condemnation, just a simple explanation. The others were getting ready too, the recruit - what was his name? Nei-something? - was scrambling about, no doubt trying to be as impressive as possible with his resolve.

Thorongil set a pace that would have been grueling for anyone, let alone someone trying to eat, but it soon became apparent I would have to postpone my meal for the time being. How did he walk that quickly, especially when he hadn’t taken even a moment to grab some of the food?

“If you don’t know what this is, why is it so important to you?” I grumbled, only for him to fall towards the back of our group and respond.

“There’s a small village there,” he said. “No matter how few people are there, they need our help and we will give it. I know we’re all tired and hungry, but we may be their only hope.”

He didn’t seem angry, and even though I still felt the pain of working my exhausted body harder, he still managed to make me feel guilty. How could I forget that there were people there, people who mattered as much as my own family? I fell silent, focusing on taking longer steps to minimize the impact on the bottoms of my feet.

Thorongil kept looking back, even when he noticed some tracks he said were important to follow. Even when we saw the village on the horizon. And his eyes flew to me as an arrow flew past, thudding into a tree trunk as the new recruit stifled a scream, as our swords flashed dim in the torches of the town, as orcs began to pour down on us.

He’d led us this far to help the people of Sírdhem, but I wondered if, even with his legendary prowess, we’d soon be needing help ourselves.


	3. Chapter 3

When the orcs appeared, I felt as green as when I first met him. Why hadn’t I recognized the odd tracks, notified him sooner? We were outnumbered, perhaps even to the point of hopelessness. No amount of orders from even the best commander could halt the surge of enemies.

“Neithon!” he called out. “Go left!” I still needed to hear that from him to spring into action, but the others didn’t - they were already in motion, trying to figure out how to best defeat the enemy.

I trusted him enough to simply go without looking, and found myself in a far more defensible situation instead of having my back up against a tree. How had he thought of it so fast? I wondered as my body began to go through the motions of a battle, nothing especially out of the ordinary, except for the sudden arrival of someone who looked Gondorian, but wore no armor whatsoever.

He shouted something in what sounded like Sindarin, but my command of the language was poor even in the schoolroom, let alone in the middle of a battle. Thorongil looked over at him, shocked, but I didn’t have time to look much more. There were too many swords still coming at me, too many arrows to dodge.

Our injuries were minor. The newcomer was far more helpful than we could have imagined, and when the fighting stopped, I finally got a good look at him. He looked like Thorongil but about my age; I wondered briefly if he had a son before recalling the one time he’d opened up to me, when I shared my own woes about love.

This was the proof he shared with me, and even as the others looked at me in the tavern, I remembered how we looked at the newcomer. He was wounded - a sword slash to the leg, not too deep - but Thorongil rushed over to him as if he was dying, then eased him onto the ground and slowly helped him. His shoulders and back were stiff, as if he had deeper injuries than anything we could see.

Who was this man? I wondered for a long time, but he never gave a name. He was gone by the next day, and so was our way of life up to this point.


	4. Chapter 4

It was supposed to be an ambush on our forces, but they drastically underestimated our captain.

He saw their tracks first, he ran us ragged to get there, and then, as the battle raged, he ran over to our ally, shouting a few words that seemed to bolster him greatly. 

When all was done, he knelt by our ally who had appeared out of nowhere, only to ask him if he was well and help him stand and reposition his shoulders. They looked stiff, and I wondered how he’d even fought like that, let alone fought well.

“My pack - does anyone see my pack?” Thorongil asked, a little panic in his voice. Strange; we’d saved the village, only for him to start worrying now.

“I see it,” I said, bringing it over to him, wincing at the way it had been cut open by an enemy’s sword.

“Thank you,” he said, then motioned for me to stay. “This is Lumorndir, you have nothing to fear from him, or any of my men,” he said when the man looked terrified.

“I’m so sorry,” the man said. From up close, he didn’t even look like a grown man - he looked like a boy trying to be a man, and he looked up at Thorongil like a son trying to appease his father.

It struck me then that the stranger, even young and wounded as he was, looked quite a lot like our captain. Thorongil was always adamant in never speaking about his family, even as he listened to everyone else describe their joys and woes with their loved ones - but this was undeniable.

The man moaned a few words in some language I didn’t know, louder this time as Thorongil reached his hand inside his pack. Did he look… shaky? It was so strange for him to be anything less than the calm man we all knew, and it made everything seem more dangerous. I sat up that night, not quite sure what to do as Thorongil kept waking to tend to him, wondering if he was some sort of friend or perhaps even a family member.

Who was Thorongil, really? We’d all asked him in one way or another, but it seemed like this boy knew more than we did. I stayed quiet, determined to watch and see what would happen. Surely, if Thorongil really was shaky, he would let something go sooner or later.


	5. Chapter 5

We sat around the fire, trying to look like we weren’t watching the captain rummaging through his bag, searching for herbs and muttering something under his breath. I started playing a folk song that could calm the stranger’s nerves and my own. My heart still pounded from a sword-blow that hit too close for comfort, a lucky glance off the side of my blade when I hadn’t even been looking.

It was hard not to watch as the captain finally found his herbs, made a gathering of them, and set a small pot on a small fire. For a long time, my music was the only thing sound in the little clearing. Even the townspeople kept their distance, leaving some food and their thanks before hastily returning to their homes.

Thorongil worked for what seemed like an inordinately long time as Lumorndir fussed with a small scrape on his arm and Herion pored over a map. The silence seemed interminable until Thorongil finally moved aside and the stranger lifted his head.

“Eat, my friend,” Thorongil said softly, moving over to us to get some of what we’d prepared. I stopped playing when I saw the look on his face. He looked like I assumed the stranger felt after being cut like that and losing so much blood; his face was so pale that I wondered if he had taken an injury on the battlefield that he neglected to help the stranger. 

“Are you well?” I asked as he passed by. I wasn’t too new to not know that healing made him tired, but this seemed even more than that, like he was exhausted in mind, not just in body.

“I’ve always found healing exhausting, Ganneldir,” he said, not the answer I knew was true. Something else had to be going on; this was no ordinary tiredness that weighed so heavily on his mind.

He took counsel with the stranger, talking to him as kindly and gently as he spoke to the youngest child, and finally offered him a jar with the rest of a poultice and a thick wad of bandages. He was gone by the time I woke up the next morning - how could he travel like that? - but Thorongil, it seemed, had made no move to follow. And judging by the dark circles under his eyes, he also made no attempt to sleep.

“Thorongil?” I approached him when he started packing his things. His eyes looked hollow, his movements seemed drained. There was no way he could convince me or anyone else with even the slightest sense that he was well.

“We are needed in Minas Tirith,” he said, with no other explanation. No one asked questions. Surely, people could tell that our erstwhile ally in the fight hadn’t been a soldier of Gondor, at least from his livery, but we couldn’t argue with our captain’s word.

“Have hope that we will meet again” were his last words to me. I was no sailor, and even as Herion and some of the others accompanied him on his new mission that had apparently come from the scout, something didn’t sit well in my gut. An old pain resurfaced when he spoke the same words all these years later as proof, but not for him. In a way, I resented the stranger who came from afar, helpful and wounded as he was, for taking my captain away.


	6. Chapter 6

“As I’ve told you before, he told none of us where he was going, or why he left.” Herion knotted his hands together, then untangled his fingers.

“You were his second in command, Herion. You knew him better than anyone. Am I to believe that he wouldn’t tell even you where and why he was going?”

“I don’t know anything, I promise - it’s like I told you, we finished the fight, he stood on the prow of one of the Corsair ships, and then he just left.”

“So you’re telling me you’re not part of some secret plan to take over Gondor in his name?”

“He - we - only ever served Gondor in the steward’s name,” Herion said. In an awkward pause in the conversation, another roar echoed from the crowd below as they reveled in their hard-won safety. If only Thorongil had seen fit to return, Herion would be in that party now, looking for his sweetheart among the celebration.

“And are you willing to tell him that, to his face?” The questioner asked, and the door swung open again, revealing an old man carrying a white rod who bore a grieved look on his face.

“I just want to know… I just want to find out where he went. He was like my son,” the old steward said.

Herion hurriedly bowed. “My lord Steward, I have not seen Thorongil since the end of the battle, when he stepped off the ship into unknown lands.”

“Why would he do such a thing?” the steward asked kindly, fatherly, somehow making Herion less scared even though the dire consequences of not having the right answers still hung over his head.

“I don’t know,” Herion admitted. “None of us know.”

And it was not for lack of trying. All the men who’d worked with Thorongil were asked, and were asking themselves, why their captain had left right as they achieved a decisive victory over the Corsairs. They combed over every detail of the fight, and every mission before, trying to put together the pieces. Their captain was a mysterious man, certainly, but every one of them had trusted him like he was family.

Their reactions were mixed. Some of the men who’d served with him for years felt taken advantage of, like they were duped into trusting an unsavory man. Others made up every excuse in the book to justify his actions. All Herion knew was that Thorongil had to have his reasons. Thorongil was trustworthy, even if he came from nowhere and disappeared the same way.

Some people forgot about Thorongil, or treated his very name like a legend. Herion led the rangers as best as he could, married the sweetheart he’d once told Thorongil about, cursed his former captain when they had trouble had children, and named his only daughter Ghillie. She had a more proper name, of course, but somehow, Herion had become one of the ones who couldn’t let go.


	7. Chapter 7

Thorongil, who seemed more and more credible the more he relived their story, stopped when Herion spoke of his daughter. He sighed, placing his mug down on the table a little too hard. “The boy in Sírdhem was my cousin,” he explained. “He’d been looking for me, and was captured. All he could say was his message.”

“‘He knows,’” Herion echoed. “He said it over and over. And you knew I’d heard it too. You looked at me like I was a threat.”

Thorongil nodded. “I knew I could trust you - all of you - and that you would never betray anything you learned of my cousin or of me to the steward or anyone else.” Denethor’s name hung over the silence. “But I couldn’t let you get hurt like he had, and he agreed with me. I had to go, even though it nearly broke me to do it. I couldn’t see another young man hurt for my sake. Especially not any of you, who I considered - who I still consider - among my closest friends.”

“You seemed so calm,” Herion said. “So peaceful, as you stepped off that boat.”

“I hoped to come back one day, but it’s not easy for a man to live on hope for so long,” he answered. “I had no way of knowing if I would ever see you again - and so many of you, I will never see again. But I heard you had gathered on this day, perhaps as a remembrance of sorts, and I couldn’t help but see you again.”

“Why did you leave Gondor? What did he know?” asked Carastor, his food forgotten.

Thorongil paused and took a sip of his ale. “People have called me many things over the years. One of my favorites is being a friend to you, my fellow soldiers of Gondor,” he said quietly. “But Thorongil was a name of my own devising.”

“So my Ghillie - ”

“I am honored beyond belief that you would name your daughter for me, Herion, and I will always consider Thorongil as one of my names.” He paused, then smiled with satisfaction as he finally said the one thing that made him leave all those years ago, and now, brought him back where he belonged. “But my father named me Aragorn.”


End file.
